Pioneering under polar ice near Antarctica - essential research for future Earth

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - How will the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) behave as our Earth continues to warm? That is what a large international team of scientists, including Utrecht-based earth scientist Francesca Sangiorgi , will investigate in the SWAIS2C project. This fall, the first cores will be drilled in the country under the WAIS. These drill cores contain information that may be essential to our future, but have been impossible to obtain until now. They serve as a timeline of past climate, up to 3 million years ago. By reconstructing warmer periods in as much detail as possible, predictions for the WAIS, and thus our warming planet, become more accurate. "And that's essential, because the WAIS contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 4 meters," Sangiorgi said. West Antarctica is melting fast, making it one of the most sensitive places to climate change worldwide.